A/N: Sorry this chapter took so long guys, Sue was hard to write. Hope I did her justice. Thanks so much for all the reviews, alerts and favorites! Keep it up!
Sue Sylvester's resumè was impressive, and it afforded her a very unique skill-set, which was how the cheerleading coach always delivered on her promise to win. Sue's life had not been an easy one, but it gave her one very distinct advantage over most of the vast, gutless majority: she could handle almost anything, and that singular advantage was exactly why Sue Sylvester never lost.
But today was a different game entirely.
This wasn't a game. This was…life.
Nobody quit the Cheerios except that one girl. You either died or you were kicked off, and nobody died on her watch. Not if Sue Sylvester had anything to do with it.
Of course, this wasn't exactly something she saw coming, but she thought she knew the girl better than that, thought that giving her the tools to win was enough.
Oh sure, she'd lost people before. Her parents died in a car crash when she was twenty, leaving her alone to shoulder the responsibility of a sister who did not have the mental capacity to care for herself. But tragic as it was, you accept as a child that you loose your parents. It's part of life. It's sad, but you deal with it. Then you move on.
But loosing a student? A student like Santana Lopez? To suicide? That didn't happen. Not on her watch.
She was the only student…the only one out of all the students that Sue taught…that she would never call stupid because Lopez lived and breathed the Sue Sylvester Survival Guide. She always followed orders. She always made the mark. She never missed a step. And Lopez didn't just do what Sue asked with skill, but watching Lopez over the course of the two years she'd been at McKinley High was like watching a younger version of herself.
So when Figgins told her that morning that the girl had offed herself, it just simply…did not compute.
This was the one thing that was NEVER part of the Sue Sylvester playbook. It just simply…wasn't possible. Self-destruction was never part of the lesson. Self-hatred and suppressed anger that she knew typically accompanied an act of desperation such as this just wasn't Sue's style.
She had no use for suppressed anger. Anger was much more useful when it was expressed, and right now, she wanted more than anything else in the world to express anger.
But that would have to wait. For now, she had the unfortunate task of informing the rest of the Cheerios (sans Brittany and Ladyface) that their teammate had chosen to leave this mortal coil thus screwing up in the biggest possible way.
She was waiting in the gym when they filed in one by one, each of them exhibiting the fear and confusion in their eyes at the reason for the meeting.
"Listen up, ladies!" Sue said into the megaphone, pacing like a panther. "It would seem that Lopez pulled an Anna Nicole Smith. A Michael Jackson? Well, he didn't off himself technically, but…you get the idea."
"She WHAT?" one of the girls blurted out.
"Did I tell you that you could speak, McCollum?" she demanded, getting up in the Cheerio's face.
"Did. I. Say. You. Could. Speak?" She demanded again in the megaphone, aiming it at her ear. Sue was so close she could smell the girl's fear, and she knew that McCollum would be deaf for a week, at lea
st, but she didn't care. They needed to understand. She couldn't have interruptions. This was worse than passing Gallstones. This was telling them that one of their own was gone.
Pain, you worked through. But this?
Confused looks on their faces in response just reminded her of the IDIOTS she had as students. Lopez would've known what she was talking about, which, of course, sort of added insult to injury that the fact that she WASN'T smart enough to realize that now everyone was going to have to be paying for what she did.
"Oh come ON people! Would it KILL you to watch the news every once in awhile! Lopez did something INCREDIBLY stupid last night. She took some pills, and now thanks to her, she's earned you all extra practices up until the Encore Cheer of Ohio in two weeks, because now we're going to have to learn new choreography. We have to be PERFECT because LOPEZ demanded nothing LESS of herself, and that means nothing but Sue Sylvester Cleanse drinks for EVERYONE for the rest of the MONTH."
She continued, pacing up and down the line-up of uniform-clad girls.
"If I catch ANY of you eating solid food, you're gone. If ANYONE here thinks that I am going to be lenient, or soft, or make excuses for ANY of you if we don't come in first place would be more wrong than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama starring in a porn video! Is that UNDERSTOOD? One more thing. The only thing I hate more than losing is drama. If ANYONE here thinks they have the right idea, they should THINK AGAIN, because I might push you hard enough to make you WANT to die, but hey, you know what they say about that which doesn't kill ya."
They all just stared blankly at her until one of the girls apparently got enough courage to raise her hand.
"Coach Sylvester?" Asked a girl who'd finally gained the courage to speak.
"Yes, Ferrier," she replied with a harassed sigh, annoyed that this was taking up so much of her time because the girls just couldn't seem to grasp the concept that no amount of standing there looking stupid was bringing their teammate back.
"What do we do?"
Sue Sylvester, who typically always had an answer for everything, was, for a brief nanosecond, absolutely speechless.
So she spoke from her little-used heart-muscle, and said the first thing that came to mind.
"Everyone deals with this sort of thing in their own way. Personally, when my parents died, I played their funeral song, Sympathy for the Devil e Rolling Stones on loop with a continuous supply of Cheese Whiz and a streaming marathon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was ready to face the world again in a couple of days, but hey, that's just me. But you know what? I say do what you've gotta do. You want to cry, hug, hold hands? Give each other hot-lesbian kisses? If that's the case, before you start, Ben-Isreal and I have an arrangement and he'd like to cut you in on a little deal. Whatever it is you do, I don't care. Deal with it your own way. Just not on my time."
Sue's speech was interrupted by the ringing bell signaling the beginning of the first period of the day.
"Back to class, ladies. And if anyone needs to talk…that's what the guidance councilor's office is for."
Taking it all out on Will Schuester later that day at lunch almost made up for the fact that she didn't have a puppy to kick, but it felt empty when what he said actually made some kind of twisted sense.
Had it been her fault? Had this happened because of her Of course not. That was impossible. She was Sue FUCKING Sylvester. Sue Fucking Sylvester was rough. Her standards were high. She demanded nothing less than first place from her students, and those students went on to be successes in life for it. Was she about to change that because someone died? Not on your life.
But still…if it had been anyone else, it'd be different, but this was Lopez. Santana Lopez.
Sue Sylvester didn't know how or why, but after a less-than-productive Cheerio rehearsal later that afternoon, she found herself pulling into the Magnolia Manor Nursing Home. It loomed ahead, and she remembered the first time she brought her sister here after her parents were killed.
It was quite possibly the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, but it got easier with each and every visit. Not that she didn't enjoy seeing her sister, it was just…the memories…the horrible, painful memories that she tried to lock away with each and every win kept creeping out at the seams.
"I'm here to see Jean Sylvester," Sue informed the Concierge Clerk. And it was sheer coincidence that Jean happened to being ushered back by a large orderly named Wendell at that very moment on her way back from the afternoon activity for the day.
"Sue! It's not even the weekend!" her sister said, greeting her in a big bear hug.
"We had popsicles for desert every day so we had to save them all, because Mrs. Lovell made us use them for arts and crafts," she explained as they made their way to her room, holding up a kleenex box-holder that she'd fashioned from the sticks.
"You're not letting them push you around here are ya?" Sue asked her, walking with her to her room.
"If they try, I tell them who my big sister is, and that makes 'em stop."
"I'm glad, Jean," Sue said with a smile that did not reach her eyes.
"Sue, you look sad," Jean told her, sitting on the bed.
"I can never hide anything form you, Jean. You're just too smart for me, you know that?" she replied, tears streaming down her face.
"Oh, Sue…don't cry…why are you crying?" she said, hugging her sister as tightly as she could and handing her one of the tissues from her newly-made tissue holder fashioned out of popsicles. "You get the first tissue from my brand new box, Sue. That makes you very special."
"A student died yesterday, Jean," Sue said simply.
"It'll be okay, Sue," Jean said, hugging her. "I know you taught her a lot."
"I'm wondering if maybe that's the problem, Jean. I'm wondering if maybe…I taught her the wrong things."
"You're a good teacher, Sue. You taught me how to throw spitballs at Wendell. I got him good yesterday. He wouldn't give me the red jell-o for lunch even though he had some on other trays. They didn't let me go outside, but I don't think Wendell will be giving me lime jell-o again."
"I don't want you to get in trouble too much, Jean. I think…I think I might've taught this girl the wrong things."
"You're the best teacher in the world. You teach me a lot, Sue," Jean said.
"You teach me a lot too, Jean." Sue replied.
